Dub and the Virtual Sound Space

The unique ability of the dub artist is to create a virtual universe in your mind. A three dimensional canvas to stage his sonic wizardry. Using low, rolling baselines and sparse drum hits, Lee "Scratch" Perry evokes a futuristic and mystical sound space on his tracks. One of the most important things to a dub artist is their production space. Most artists at this time had a very personal connection to their craft that stems from having a 'sacred ground' in which to work.

David Toop, a well respected writer on contemporary music explains how Lee Perry and his contemporaries approached the mixing board in the recording process. He says, "the mixing board becomes a pictorial instrument, establishing the illusion of a vast soundstage and then dropping instruments in and out, as if they were characters in a drama."

Lee Perry's studio was called the Black Ark, and it was there he worked with many famous Reggae artists, including Junior Murvin, the Heptones, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. I believe there is a direct correlation between Perry's studio space, and the virtual sonic space that he crafts on his dub tracks. If the producer's studio is the vehicle, then the mixing board is his control center. Using a plethora of effects and techniques, Perry opens up a world inside your head. Sending elements of sound across your mind like a shooting star. He deconstructs instrument sounds and reconfigures them in a new ways. The sparseness and slow tempo of the music actually enhances its ability to create an inner space in your mind. Perry's tricks open the universe inside your head where you can sit embryonically floating and watching the sonorous elements fly towards and away from you at the speed of sound.

Perry's track "Upsetting Dub" starts off with a tight drum roll that explodes and multiplies outward into the universe. These, delay-heavy drum hits are a staple of dub music, as they repeat faster and faster ad infinitum, they give the impression of staring into an infinity mirror. You can imagine each sonic element visually in your mind. The drama metaphor used by Toop is very apt. There is a story unfolding, each part of the composition carries a personality. A strum of the guitar, saturated in reverb brings a harsh and isolating feel. A bold drum fills up the space in the front of your mind before spiraling out into orbit. A cool melody from the organ lulls you into a place of meditation until it is cut short and aggressively looped, shocking you from your complacence. The low, meandering groove comes in the form of a slow lackadaisical bass line. It is the only anchor in the song, and is essentially the vehicle upon which the listener travels through the track. It serves as a vantage point to keep you grounded as other sonic elements are firing off above and below you. Overly-reverberated snare hits cut through the space like a knife, then ricochet off into the nothing. A semblance of a drum beat is created, giving an assertive direction to the track. Though no sooner has it settled in, it is abruptly removed where it disintegrates and echoes away.

Like many of his contemporaries, Perry's Black Ark studio did not feature the latest in recording technology. In fact, much of his equipment was rudimentary and dilapidated. It was by the creative genius of the producer which imbued each track with a mix of black magic and cosmology.

This unique approach to the recording process would make a lasting impression on music to come. The Boards of Canada are one group that has made studio sound crafting as important in the musical process as the music itself. This electronic duo use modern processing techniques to give their sound a retro feel. They, like Lee Perry, strive to strip the music down to the basic elements. Imperfections are celebrated rather than avoided. With this mindset, the music can be organic and vibrant; it takes on a life of its own. The Boards of Canada acknowledge this feeling in the title of their 1998 album, "Music Has the Right to Children.

The essence of Dub

“Dubbing, at its very best, takes each bit and imbues it with new life, turning a rational order of musical sequences into an ocean of sensation.”

This quote from Audio Cultures ch. 51 Replicant: On Dub by David Toop really gives a good image of what dub music is about and the effect it projects on the listener. In the track titled, Flash Gordon Meets Luke Skywalker by Scientist and Prince Jammy you can really hear the elements of dub and the special techniques they use in the studios to create the very spatial sounds they desire. As the track starts we hear echoes of voices and a muffled bass guitar as if it is being played underwater. Every sound is repeated and delayed with precision to give it the sound that I have come to expect from a dub track. The essay by Toop discusses how the sounds that the dub producers were making were “giving the impression of an eerie tropical ghost town.”

The sound in Flash Gordon Meets Luke Skywalker definitely eludes to empty deserted streets. I can’t help but imagine a producer alone in a studio for hours late at night at their mixing boards trying to create the perfect sonic, spatial atmosphere. The track name really highlights the outer space emphasis in a lot of these tracks. There is a narrative that runs through dub tracks that are reminiscent of science fiction. “No coincidence that the nearest approximation to dub is the sonar transmit pulses, reverberations and echoes of underwater echo ranging and bioacoustics.” This quote also from Toops easy, really helps give a sense of the sounds associated with dub music. All the delays and repetitions are carefully crafted to form the essence of a dub track.

Once Around Altair

This delightfully eerie and minimal track by Louis and Bebe Baron was a huge leap of faith for its time. A leap of faith because it required much more from the listener to be enjoyable. Heavy filter oscillations cascade from high to low, varying in layering and timbre. Using little other than the conventional analog synthesizers to create alien-like spaceship passes were inspired by the hi-fi revolution and the atomic age, where people were fascinated by the space program and the impending humungous shift in energy consumption and possible discovery of life outside of planet earth.

What was innovative about this album no less this piece of music was the fact that it required much more from the listener. Most music in the mid twentieth century was very accessible to the general public, did not require any participation from the listener, but for this piece to be effective you have to close your eyes and envision the world that the Baron's are trying to create, to submit and use the sound object to enhance a visual imagery that is left up to the listener to paint in their mind. This new style parallels with Glen Gould's segment in Audio culture called "The Participant Listener", where he states that "..there is a new kind of listener-- a listener more participant in the musical experience. The emergence of this mid-twentieth century phenomenon is the greatest achievement of the record industry. For this listener is no longer passively analytical; he is an associate who's tastes, preferences and inclinations even now alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives his attention, and upon who's fuller participation to the future of the art of music awaits" (121-122).

Dub has changes overtime but still contains the same elements. David Toop talks about the fact that dub is the type of music that regenerates throughout the years. All dub is the same no matter what year it was created right? Wrong! David’s concept stuck with me because I do not know much about dub especially dub before today. King Tubby came out with the song Borderline Dub in 1996. When I listen to this song I think reggae not dub, but David Toop has helped me understand why it is dub. He says, “dub music is a long echo delay, looping overtime.” When I listen to this song I hear the repetition and the echoing that he speaks of in this chapter. It helps me understand the meaning of dub.

When I hear the song Gave Dub by Boxcutter, which was made in 2006, i see that regeneration of dub throughout the years. This song has all of the elements of dub that Toop speaks of, but is in an extremely different sound. This is the sound I think of when I think of dub. When comparing the two songs side by side, I understand his concept of regeneration. These songs are both dub, but dub has changed since 1996. Now it has become more universally known as the shattering loud noise that he speaks of, but King Tubby has music that is calmer and a little quieter than dub today.

Repetition in DJ culture and its effect on our experiences

Mixing and altering songs and sounds plays with space rather than time, allowing not only the aspects of the song to repeat, but also listeners to repeatedly listen to the performance. In fact, Brian Eno states that recording transforms transient and ephemeral sounds into repeatable and memorable songs (Cox and Warner 127). The constant repetition of the rhythm and sounds provides listeners with a memory-based interpretation of the emotion portrayed through the song, encouraging people to listen to songs multiple times in order to hear all of the sounds within the mix. One example of this idea is “Glass” by Kode9 + the Spaceape. This song uses repetition with the same sounds fading in and out throughout to create a constant rhythm, and a speaking voice seems to be the only distinct change. Consequently, it creates a tranquil effect that draws in people in order to repeatedly listen to it. Like “Glass,” “Upsetting Dub” by Lee Perry and “Dark Side” by Scientist both have a strong rhythm due to repeating soundsAfter listening to it a number of times, one may get encapsulated by the sounds, creating an environment based on memories of the old sounds in order to focus on the emotions felt in the past and present.

Paul D. Miller supports this idea in his article “Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory” in Audio Culture:

“Triggered by the sensuous touch of the DJ’s hands guiding the mix, the spectral trace of sounds in your mind that existed before you heard them, telling your memory that the mixed feelings you get, the conflicting impulses you feel when you hear it are impressions – externalized thoughts that tell you you only know that you have never felt what you thought you were feeling because you have never really listened to what you were hearing."

Miller describes the listening experience as emotional and psychological because of the repeating noises and subtle differences in sounds listeners discover after numerous listens. Like with Pierre Schaeffer’s “Etude Violette,” subtle changes in the song “Glass” are only noticeable after repeating listening sessions. Although “Glass” has a stronger, more distinct rhythm, both songs provide listeners with an emotional, temporal experience.

Cutting the Conductor

When considering an audio track such as Louis and Bebe Barron's Battle with the Invisible Monster, from the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet, one thing is very obvious: the sounds were not made by a band. No orchestra of strings and wind instruments could make such noises, so they are obviously electronic in nature. When a composer no longer needs a band to make music, they can completely cut out the need for a conductor. As talked about in Audio Culture, the removal of the role of the conductor opened up many new possibilities for musicians. No longer was there a problem with the language of writing music that one conductor might see differently than the composer. Before, there was the problem of "the composer [writing] a piece of music in a language that might not be adequate to his ideas" (109). They had no actual control over the way the piece played - it might not sound much like what they had in mind.

Battle with the Invisible Monster is an example of something the artist had control over. They specifically picked each sound for a reason, and there is no loss of ideas for lack of language to adequately describe how to make a "bloop" of a noise. As we all know from earlier exercises, trying to describe one of these noises with language is nearly impossible. Each person will think of a different sound when they see just the word. The same can be considered for music notes on a sheet. When a composer has to write in this form, the exact sound they are thinking of cannot be translated into just a few notes. If they want it to be very specific, they could only hope that the conductor was thinking along the same lines as they were, and even then, it might not be right. A song like Grave Dub by Boxcutter is in a similar situation. The bloops and bleeps in it cannot really b described by a language. They are best heard the way the composer originally intended for them to be. Since composers were given the ability to make their own music through studios and tapes, this became possible.

Dub and Real-Time Studio Performance

"Spreading out a song or a groove over a vast landscape of peaks and deep trenches, extending hooks and beats to vanishing point, dub creates new maps of time, intangible tunes, sacred sites, balm and shock for mind, body and spirit."

David Toop, Replicant: On Dub

In Audio Cultures, a great emphasis is placed on the impact of recording technologies on practices of consumption and production. From Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's vision of a visual vocabulary for drawing grooves into vinyl to the early tape based experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and Musique Concrete, the physical medium exerts dramatic influence on the creative approach to the production and development of music. In some cases it simply allows new avenues for listening, but in others it allows entirely new modes of production. Dub--a medium made possible entirely by advances in tape-based systems--is a most compelling example of the latter. In his brief article, Replicant: On Dub, David Toop highlights some of the historical and sensational features of dub, claiming it as the herald of remix culture, as something that deconstructs and creates new meaning out of existing material, and also as a mechanism for revisioning time and space. While almost any dub track could serve to illustrate these points, I found Lee "Scratch" Perry's, Lee Perry Upsetting Dub, particularly compelling.

It begins with a drum roll that rapidly decays, seeming almost to break apart into barely cohesive shards of noise, almost like low-fi radio transmissions. A few seconds in, a deep and reverberant melody comes in. The deep space created by that reverb serves to anchor the other elements, creating cohesion at moments where there is no melody or rhythm. As the drum roll fades away, I am already on my way to outer-space. The drums come back in punctuating bursts, sometimes just a kick or a snare. But the kick or snare rises up and stretches like the drumroll at the beginning. Soon one of these swells takes over completely and the melody falls out for a measure. When it comes back, it seems to have taken on new force so that plucks begin cascading into echo chambers, implying a space not restrained to a studio, but reaching far out into the cosmos and slapping back. As I listen over and over, I start seeing Lee Perry as the captain of the Black Ark, interstellar spacecraft, rapidly moving between sliders and knobs, charting a path through the sensational unknown. Kicks start sounding like spring-loaded cartoon anti-gravity boots. Snares repeat off into infinity, slowly dropping away at the edges of perception. About halfway through, the whole band seems to be on stage. The harmonium (is it?) drones away in the back; Larger than life guitar skanks slip in and out, super sonic, like a dirt road turned into a four lane highway; hand drums and kit drums concerting and combating. Suddenly the guitar is gone and a nasal kazoo blast rides up to the top, atonal, almost a snarl, implying deep discontent and even eliciting a sense of dread, but for only a moment, as if to remind us that in adventure there is also always danger. Then the drums take on a steadier rhythm for the rest of the track, layering and oscillating between a kit and hand drums. A lighter, almost celebratory melody takes over and the track begins to fade out.

Lee Perry Upsetting Dub is a great example of the ways that a studio approach to composition enables producers to work in new creative modes. What is particularly compelling to me about dub is the real-time aspect. The tape manipulations of Shaeffer, Henry or Oswald (of whom I am also a huge fan), are painstaking labors of love, processes of highly detailed cutting and splicing often written out as a visual score prior to compilation. Conversely, the tape manipulations of dub, while studio based, are primarily live; that is, the producers are listening to the playback of the original tracks and making decisions at the moment of listening on how to sculpt, alter, layer, or oppose material. As tools like Ableton Live and Max/MSP become more and more powerful, enabling things like auto-quantization, and as laptops really do become more and more like virtual studios, the boundaries between what is possible in the confines of a studio and live are beginning to blur. In either case, we can see that the studio, whether physical or virtual, is a form of instrument, laden with untapped potential and even entirely new genres.

"In a compositional sense… one becomes empirical in a way that the classical composer never was… It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter--he's working directly with a material, working directly on a substance, and he always retains the potions to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc."

Brian Eno, The Studio As Compositional Tool

Communication and meaning through Sound Compositions

                  Sounds were not only just subjected to experiments with different sonorous manipulating technology, but they could  be organized and induce a certain feeling or emotion and a way of expression.  Composer Pierre Henry was more interested in communication and use of language in his pieces.  His pieces were about creating a feeling and emotion.  In his terms, he defined communication as having "expressivity, accessibility, and referentiality" (Taylor, 61).  He believes that his works must have a overarching theme or significance in order to have meaning in them. He acheived this through electronic music and a library of sounds he had collected.  You can hear that in his  pieces that he had collaborated with Michel Colombier, with "Teen Tonic," a mix of electronic, soothing beats, vocals, and clashing objects incorporated from various sounds.  In his "Psyche Rock" piece with Michel Colombier, which later inspired the tv series Futurama produced before the turn of the century, he mentions that this piece in many ways retells the history of the psychedelic mood of that period.  It also inspired others to look back and use Henry's work of what the future might have been imagined or was hoped to be in the animated series.  There is definitely a narrative within the piece, which seems to have several layers with a complex and even chaotic structure with its' reverbs, soothing background beats, and screechy foregrounded sounds.  In many ways, his pieces are described as having certain poetic elements that are able to create a transient mood and inspire visuals over the listener.  His pieces even inspire a certain idea of upbeat technological sounds and unknown eeriness from sonorous objects with overlaid opposing and distinct elements.
               Although Pierre Schaeffer and Henry had worked together, their styles were significantly different.  As Taylor mentions, Schaeffer's pieces were rather "empirical" because he approached his works in a scientific manner, while Henry was more about the story and was idea driven.  When you listen to Pierre Schaeffer's piece, "Etude Noire,"  you notice the repetition of alternating sounds in different spaces, but the structure is much more predictable and formal, while introducing various sound elements throughout.  In contrast,  Henry's pieces are code driven, they have a certain meaning that he has personally encoded as a composer and is therefore meant to be understood and not just heard.  He calls himself a "communicator" and not necessarily an artist, since he composes to create another form of language through sound.  Schaeffer admits Henry's pieces when listened to, "one feels something of being taken by anguish, fear, emotion, waiting" (61).  I think he is much as an artist as other self labeled artist composers.  Even though his pieces can be widely read for meaning and can be placed in various environments for atmospheric effect, his works are about self expression and using the audio medium as a way to communicate a message or an overarching theme.

Anxiety in Space-Age America

While French artists such as Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier took a fairly optimistic approach to the musical interpretation of space-age innovation, the Cold War anxieties of United States citizens fueled much more apprehensive works. This sense of foreboding lingered from the detonation of the atom bombs at the end of World War II, as well as an anxiety about the possibilities implicit in soon-to-be explored outer space. As Taylor writes on page 87 of his book, Strange Sounds, “I’m describing this as a kind of drama because it is. It can be read as caputuring—even forecasting—the attitudes toward the technology of the era, attitudes that were somewhat playful and hopeful while at the same time concerned and anxious.” This cultural context is well-illustrated and incorporated in Louis and Bebe Barron’s track “Deceleration” from the soundtrack for “Forbidden Planet”.

“Deceleration” begins with slowly undulating waves of low-pitched sound, slowly rising to a crescendo of high-pitched noises with interspersed higher-pitched glitchy sounds. The electronic sounds emulate the movement of something rotating faster and faster, building up to ear-splitting screeches. Finally, the momentum breaks as the high-pitched screeches give way back to slowly undulating lower-pitched sounds. This track represents the descent of the spacecraft in one of the first sci-fi movies released in the 1950’s, Louis and Bebe Barron’s experimental approach succeeds in creating an eerie discomfort regarding the unknown of this “Forbidden Planet”. This track compares strongly against the musical creations of Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, which convey a more upbeat, adventurous outlook on the future with compositions that employ some of the same abstract, glitchy electronic sounds, but also incorporate a quick, upbeat melody throughout songs such as “Psyche Rock”. Together, these two outlooks on the changing technologies of the Space Age create a strange duality of fear and excitement, foreboding and embrace.

DJ Spooky

DJ as an interpreter of cultural memory resonated with me. Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (2011) explains that sounds are tied to collective memory. What exactly does Miller mean by collective memory? No, this is not simply the top 100 songs that characterized a certain period of time, although that is certainly included. Rather, Miller is trying to ascertain the ubiquitous sounds that characterize the everyday. These include everything from the scratches, pops, hisses, and cracks of the city to the beeps, vibrations, and noises of our personal electronics. Each of these different sounds resonates (anamnesis). Sounds evoke different memories for different people. Take for example the Mario theme song. Listening to it, whether tied into a rap song, or randomly in the background of a space, I am immediately transported to elementary school sleep overs, staying up all night eating Pizza Hut and drinking diet coke. For others, this song may elicit other memories, such as being snowed in and playing video games. Hence, the sound, although collective, triggers individual responses. So, while we may all react to the same sounds, Brian Massumi (2005) explains, we all react differently. He writes, “jacked into the same modulation of feeling, bodies reacted in unison without necessarily acting alike.”(p. 32). The DJ, then, is able to take these little fragments of memory and remix them, putting them in conversations with other memories. This mixing and recoding of collective memory undermines the rudimentary categories of the subject. The DJ produces an experience that plays with time (exciting past memories), place (altering the space associated with that memory), culture (by placing different cultural referents next to one another), and identity (transforming the meaning of a sound). Miller explains that “any sound can be you. It is through the mix and all that it entails—the re-configuration of ethnic, national, and sexual identity—that humanity will hopefully, move into another era of social evolution”(p.354). In other words, the DJ’s goal is to interpret culture in such a way, as to invoke powerful memories and enable novel forms of subjectivity. Or, to put it in Deleuzian terms, he is concerned with shaping subjectivity trajectories.

In Pandemonium, Miller demonstrates a lot of these concepts, by taking and manipulating ordinary sounds to create a sonic experience. He is, in a sense, updating John Cage’s work. Instead of playing with just a radio landscape, Miller investigates the sounds that characterize the totality of our media environment. Within his short bricologue, Miller cites loops, video game noises, backward tape, songs from the radio, sounds from the telephone, sirens, as well as his DJ equipment. He then takes these noises and places them together in novel ways. For example he distorts the tempo and speed of a voice and then fades it on top of sharp laser sounds. Each of these different effects is meant to evoke different memories. The sounds of dialing a telephone, for example, may excite a number of memories, but how are we to make sense of that memory when it is juxtaposed with loud sirens? What about when chimes are entered into the equation? All of these different experiences produce an altered sense of subjectivity. Miller takes different memories and smacks them together, producing new ways of thinking about the world. Speaking strictly in the “untimely space” or the space of potential, this mix is able to create the potential for new lines of flight. If memory, as Massumi explains, is the medium of habit, remixing the way we understand the self creates the potential for novel forms of subjectivity. That is, if memories determine how we comport ourselves in the world, creating unique permutations of them opens the potentials for new ways of being in the world.

Massumi, B. (2005). Fear (the spectrum said), Positions 13, 31-48.